How To Tell If You Are In A Jorge Luis Borges Story -The Toast

How To Tell If You Are In A Jorge Luis Borges Story

ByDaniel Mallory Ortberg

on July 10, 2014 in How To Tell If You’re In a Novel

Previously in this series: How to tell if you’re in a Dorothy Parker story.

You are in a library that may not exist. You are having a terrible time.

It is unclear whether you have been writing the story, or the story has been writing you.

You visit the south of Argentina, where something terrible happens to you.

You are standing inside a sphere. Its center is everywhere and its circumference is nowhere. You are terrified.

Everyone around you is being murdered in a perfect Kabbalistic pattern.

A Scottish man sells you a book that ruins your life.

A red-haired woman tells you that you have always been a dead man.

You are lost in the desert. Your map is the desert itself.

You may have committed a murder. You’re not sure.

Everywhere you look, you see a sinister equilateral triangle.

A train conductor is rude to you, who was once a king in Babylon.

You are dreaming. You have never existed. You are being born. You are a thinly veiled version of Borges himself, and you have been dying for a thousand years.

A gaucho with a knife is laughing at you. There is blood on your saddle, but you have been in a hospital for the last four days. There is no saddle. Now it is you who is holding the knife, and no one is laughing.

You are standing in the middle of an empty city that is also the corpse of a tiger. There is one company in the entire world, and it does not exist, but it is watching you.

You may be a man, but then again you may be a mathematical thought experiment; it’s difficult to tell.

You die in a labyrinth.

Mallory is an Editor of The Toast.

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+35 Vote up Vote down

egrain 114p · 558 weeks ago

I clearly need to read more Borges.

2 replies · active 558 weeks ago

+45 Vote up Vote down

WanderingDancer 95p · 558 weeks ago

This is always, always the answer.

+8 Vote up Vote down

Janie_S 104p · 558 weeks ago

Yes and also yes.

+29 Vote up Vote down

anninyn 124p · 558 weeks ago

A Scottish man sells you a book that ruins your life.

Well, the guy at the till when I bought Kraken (see Most Hated Books thread) had a scottish accent.

+37 Vote up Vote down

rusty_spatula 112p · 558 weeks ago

Your day is a translucent network of minimal surprises.

+34 Vote up Vote down

radventuretime 103p · 558 weeks ago

Everything that could ever happen has already happened, but simultaneously none of it ever has. You are told this in a wood paneled study by an old, eccentric friend and it makes you feel ennnui.

+58 Vote up Vote down

threatqualitypress 136p · 558 weeks ago

you are an ancient wizard, watcihng yourself as a young boy who is unaware of the fact that he will one day travel backward in time to become his own mentor

1 reply · active 558 weeks ago

+20 Vote up Vote down

tisthevoiceofthelobster 82p · 558 weeks ago

ronbledore!

+40 Vote up Vote down

deleted2845473 107p · 558 weeks ago

Oh man, I'm working my way through the big Collected Fictions volume as we speak.

You are having a fake debate with your real literary friends when a letter of questionable veracity arrives in the mail.

Your religion is a weird mashup of Zorastrianism and indigenous south American belief. I dunno man, it's like 1940 and orientalism is still cool.

You are sentenced to death, but the method of execution is awesome. You find that the afterlife is an elaborate metaphor for a branch of philosophy that you were definitely not familiar with when you read this story the first time around in undergrad.

2 replies · active 529 weeks ago

+10 Vote up Vote down

tubatoothpaste 122p · 558 weeks ago

Ha, I feel like that's what a lot of authors are saying to us: "IDK man, it's like 1940... this shit still flies here so I'm gonna go with it."

+1 Vote up Vote down

Paul · 529 weeks ago

You'll probably never see this comment because it's 29 weeks too late, but those are truly terrible translations in that book. Please please don't base your opinion of his writing on that book.

I'm very disappointed because I made a point of buying it in Buenos Aires, and was then sad.

+13 Vote up Vote down

deleted7410012 111p · 558 weeks ago

i know an insufferable manchild who is really into borges. as delightful as some of these might seem, mostly this just confirms to me that this dude is really far up his own patoot.

3 replies · active 558 weeks ago

+5 Vote up Vote down

ljndawson 111p · 558 weeks ago

Every insufferable manchild is really into Borges. And Gide. Gack.

+31 Vote up Vote down

Janie_S 104p · 558 weeks ago

Better Borges than Rand, I say.

+39 Vote up Vote down

deleted7410012 111p · 558 weeks ago

one time a guy i dated joked about liking rand. it put the fear in me so badly that i actually felt off balance for the rest of the night. he kept reassuring me that he was just joking, but it planted that seed of doubt...

a few weeks later he was rude to a server when we were dining out, SO WHO KNOWS.

+5 Vote up Vote down

grumblyqueer 139p · 558 weeks ago

Were you the Babylonian king, or was the conductor?

2 replies · active 558 weeks ago

+28 Vote up Vote down

hurdyburdy 150p · 558 weeks ago

The answer to this would reveal much about your life; the answer to this is utterly pointless.

+17 Vote up Vote down

threatqualitypress 136p · 558 weeks ago

The position is determined every eleven months by lottery. You have been the King of Babylon. You have been the conductor. You may be one or both again.

+36 Vote up Vote down

thejcar 126p · 558 weeks ago

1) I am considering this the best possible World Cup coverage. Go Argentina!

2) Reading Borges in Spanish was the best possible brain-breaking experience I've ever had. "Well- this makes no sense and can't be right, better look up some of these words... nope, my translation was correct, but my understanding was wrong possibly because everything is illusion!"

3) Borges rules; Marquez drools (I know they are totally different authors, different nationalities, etc, but I had to read them for the same class and this was the main thing I "learned")

8 replies · active 558 weeks ago

+32 Vote up Vote down

deleted2845473 107p · 558 weeks ago

I had to read a few of these in a Spanish class and the whole process is like *looks up word in Spanish* scratches head *looks up word in English*

+7 Vote up Vote down

Sean_Sullivan 142p · 558 weeks ago

"Memorious?"

+44 Vote up Vote down

tubatoothpaste 122p · 558 weeks ago

"Welcome to Latin American Literature class! You've probably only been studying Spanish for a few years (let's say 5 at the max), so let's start out with the most surreal stuff first, just so you feel like you're losing your mind."

+6 Vote up Vote down

radventuretime 103p · 558 weeks ago

True story - my Spanish teacher freshman year of high school decided to use Bodas De Sangre as our introduction to reading Spanish language literature and also decided to *not tell us anything about the play or give us any context beforehand.* Class discussions got very weird.

+5 Vote up Vote down

thejcar 126p · 558 weeks ago

Oh like it's not totally normal to talk about the moon wanting to bathe in the blood of young lovers; clearly y'all were the weird ones.
(NB: Bodas De Sangre upsets me to this day)

+6 Vote up Vote down

radventuretime 103p · 558 weeks ago

Don't get me wrong, I love me some Lorca, but maybe our podunk suburb was more prepared for some Romanceros Gitanos than a play whose narrative action is summed up by "MURDER DEATH MURDER DEATH NO ONE IS HAPPY EXCEPT THOSE WHO ARE MADE HAPPY BY MUDERDEATH"

+11 Vote up Vote down

MAHGAHN 88p · 558 weeks ago

They are both better than Vargas Llosa who is THE WORST.

+8 Vote up Vote down

MameDC 130p · 558 weeks ago

Borges loathed soccer, though, in like a Walter Benjamin fascism-as-spectacle kind of way. (Not in like, a "soccer is boring why don't they ever score" kind of way, which would be much easier to look past and not be troubled by).

+67 Vote up Vote down

Sean_Sullivan 142p · 558 weeks ago

Everyone around you is being murdered in a subtly imperfect Kabbalistic pattern. You take a brief respite from being murdered to hold forth on the flaw.

Mirrors and copulation are abominable, for they both multiply the numbers of men. Too bad you work at the Argentine National Mirror Museum and Sacred Bordello.

These are the last days of the Emperor Heliogabalus. You are a hierophant newly arrived in Homs, hoping to hunt down a heresiarch there. Hermetic horrors haunt your hours.

2 replies · active 558 weeks ago

+29 Vote up Vote down

radventuretime 103p · 558 weeks ago

I never thought I'd have occasion to cackle with delight over a Tlon Uqubar Orbis Tertius joke and yet here we are.

+5 Vote up Vote down

Household_Opera 104p · 558 weeks ago

ME TOO.

+43 Vote up Vote down

miprisci 132p · 558 weeks ago

Your map of the world is not big enough. Nope, still not big enough. Nope. Nope. Bigger. BIGGER. Now the map is the world, good job.

3 replies · active 558 weeks ago

+2 Vote up Vote down

grumblyqueer 139p · 558 weeks ago

I know I read that one in a Gaiman anthology. (Maybe the map was of China?)

+4 Vote up Vote down

miprisci 132p · 558 weeks ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Exactitude_in_Sci...

+3 Vote up Vote down

WanderingDancer 95p · 558 weeks ago

Yep! It's in Fragile Things, though it wasn't so much a map as a scale reproduction of China that the emperor could walk around. (But as Emby points out, Borges was all over the idea, too.)

+23 Vote up Vote down

LeastBittern 120p · 558 weeks ago

I married into a family of bilingual engineers - being chased by the twin dangers of complex language and sinister mathematics is like every Sunday evening.

+33 Vote up Vote down

elsamac 121p · 558 weeks ago

You are about to begin reading Mallory Ortberg's new essay, Are You In A Jorge Luis Borges Story? Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade.

OOPS, I took a left turn into some Calvino.

3 replies · active 558 weeks ago

+16 Vote up Vote down

Household_Opera 104p · 558 weeks ago

The emperor Kublai Khan would like to discuss this essay with you over a game of chess.

+4 Vote up Vote down

a-waltz · 558 weeks ago

Ahhh I was just on my way down here to request Calvino next!

+6 Vote up Vote down

MameDC 130p · 558 weeks ago

Do you have to pee? Well, you know best.

+13 Vote up Vote down

Household_Opera 104p · 558 weeks ago

You make an unwise purchase from a stranger that leads to your not being able to distinguish yourself from Shakespeare.

An annoying acquaintance shows you infinity in his basement but insists upon offering you a pseudo-cognac first.

(I love Borges, and this is perfect.)

+5 Vote up Vote down

Laine · 558 weeks ago

You find the easiest way to discuss things with yourself is across continents and decades. You are both right. And both wrong.

+16 Vote up Vote down

Matt · 558 weeks ago

You are a heretic, but from your perspective, everyone else is a heretic and God is a tiger.

A large number of metaphysical concepts have actually been mundane household objects all along.

You are a philosopher who has discovered all the secrets of the universe, but sadly you were born into an obscure cul-de-sac of history, which forgets you.

You are Chinese. This grants you a unique understanding of the mysteries of time.

A crime solves a detective.

Two precisely opposed schools of thought turn out to be indistinguishable. A museum curator, no longer sure whether he is in Paris or Sumeria, kills himself, and is reborn as a god.

You cannot forget. This torments you.

A fearsome Argentine gangster is merely a police officer reflected in a mirror. But there are two mirrors.

You are in a Jorge Luis Borges story. We are all in a Jorge Luis Borges story. If you are not in a Jorge Luis Borges story, this means, by definition, that you are in a Jorge Luis Borges story.

+7 Vote up Vote down

Chance Hale · 558 weeks ago

You create a taxonomy of living creatures that uses only the most arbitrary possible categories.

You devote your life to precisely recreating an already-existing taxonomy of living creatures that uses only the most arbitrary possible categories.

0 Vote up Vote down

Israel · 555 weeks ago

Dangit... Well, now I want to read Jorge Luis Borges. It sounds like Kafka + Pulp silliness + self important philosophizing.

1 reply · active 548 weeks ago

+4 Vote up Vote down

vjlute 73p · 548 weeks ago

Definitely minus pulp silliness, but X ten self-important philosophizing.

+2 Vote up Vote down

sallybosco 0p · 529 weeks ago

There's a glowing sphere floating around in your room that shows everything that is or has ever been.

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